The Lestrygonians

In the Odyssey the man of twists and turns lands his fleet at the island of the Laestrygonians, a race of giants. He sends three messengers to the palace to see if the king is hospitable, but the king promptly rips one of the men to shreds and eats him. The fleet is attacked and only Odysseus's ship escapes. Though it takes up just a couple of pages of Homer's text, this misadventure is the inspiration for an entire episode in Ulysses.

It is lunchtime in Dublin, and food is very much on Leopold Bloom's mind. Despite the tempting opening—"Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch, a sugarsticky girl shoveling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother"—the theme of food is not a happy, comforting one; Bloom is feeling negative and out of sorts from hunger, and throughout the episode food is associated with gorging, surfeit and indigestion. We see—either in reality or in Bloom's imagination—policemen red-faced and sweating after their meal, force-fed geese, vomiting dogs, and rats drowning in porter. We see a cheap restaurant whose gobbling, swilling patrons turn Bloom's stomach. There are even hints of the cannibalism in Homer; children eat their parents out of house and home, a woman with many children is described as "a good layer" as though she were a hen, and Bloom thinks of the tasting of flesh in lovemaking. There is also a parallel drawn to industry and the necessity of earning one's daily bread, with each person feeding off of another. Perhaps the most telling passage is in the dead center of the episode; Bloom has been thinking about the funeral and also of a female acquaintance who has been in labor for three days, and the circle of life suddenly seems to him a horrible, mechanical, meaningless march:

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets the notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves. Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan's mushroom houses, built of breeze. Shelter for the night.

No one is anything.

This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.

Like the dangers that meet Odysseus on his travels, the Lestrygonians is a trial for Bloom. On the outside it is a banal problem we all face every day—what to do for lunch?—but Joyce adds thoughts and associations until it stands for something larger. The danger Bloom faces is a losing of heart, a feeling that the necessity of eating—that life devours itself—is something mindless and awful, with permanence only found in the dead wreckage of sand and stone. "No one is anything."

After a cheese sandwich and a glass of wine Bloom feels more himself and charity returns: he helps a blind boy across the street.

Meanwhile, we are once again reminded of the tension between the English and the Irish. Bloom recalls an incident in which he happened to be at the scene of a political demonstration and only narrowly escaped a charging mounted policeman.